Describing the shortage of skilled manpower as the “biggest challenge” for further development of the IT sector, the prime minister's Information and Communication Technology Adviser Sajeeb Wazed Joy said the government has targeted to train 75,000 professionals in the sector in the next three years to solve the problem.
"The biggest challenge that Bangladesh is facing in the IT sector development is shortage of skilled manpower as the country could not develop enough IT labour force that it needs… the number is limited," he said in an interview with CeBIT Podcast in Germany on Thursday.
“Keeping this in mind, our government has set a target to train 75,000 IT professionals within the next three years but that is a fraction in comparison to the garment sector where millions of manpower are employed… you know that students studying in the relevant subject needs three or four years to complete the course. We are trying to catch up with them," he added.
Joy is now in Hanover, Germany for attending the Centre for Office Automation, Information Technology and Telecommunication (CeBIT) Expo.
While commenting on the much-talked-about hacking issue, Joy said the exact number of hacking that took place in Bangladesh is very hard to determine, but the Kaspersky Group, the leading security solution provider in the world, ranked Bangladesh as the No 1 country in terms of the target of the hackers.
“I think the probable reason behind this is that we have been digitised at the fastest rate. We are digitising government services… our focus is on digitising fast,” he said.
“To thwart the hackers, we are looking at upgrading our system to version 2, because many of our system is still version 1 and they are the much more target of the hackers,” he said.
Joy said the country has in the common line and the more and more companies as well as the government services have been digitised. “The growth (of the country) is bigger, unfortunately the target (of the hackers) is also bigger,” he said.
He said sufficient experts did not exist in the country when it developed the IT system in the country. "So we had to hire foreign experts that cost 10 times," he said.
Joy said 80% of digitisation in Bangladesh was undertaken by local companies. But the exception was the National ID cards and bank digitisation which were done by foreign firms, he said.
He said the digitisation of Bangladesh Bank where the country's first major hacking took place was a project undertaken by the World Bank and implemented by a foreign firm. "But other government services did not face such a major hacking," he said.
